Agriculture: leader in autonomous mobility?

26 September, 2017

In general, agriculture is well suited to autonomous mobility: farms are semi-structured, sparsely-populated environments and are thus simpler to autonomise than general driving on congested roads. There is also commercial incentive: reducing the wage bill. The challenge however, is to convince the farmers to pay for the technology and to adopt it. Indeed, farmer conservatism and the general characteristic of the agriculture market will turn this potentially revolutionary technology into an evolution.

 What happens when we take the driver out of the equation?

Taking the driver out of the equation can have profound consequences for the way we envisage agricultural machinery. The well-established notion that bigger is better has its origins in the need to enhance the productivity of the driver but this notion loses some of its relevance if farm vehicles become autonomous and unmanned.

The navigational autonomy can, therefore, initiate a major transition from large, heavy, fast and expensive vehicles towards fleets of agricultural robots. These agrobots would move slowly, giving extra attention to plants; and they would be light weight, eliminating soil compaction. They would also have to be inexpensive in order to compensate for their lower individual productivity through fleet operation.

Many small robots have been developed at the research level and a few have been commercially launched and sold. The machine designs are not the done deal yet. In fact, there is still some way to go: these robots often only work on highly structured farms and on crops with limited height; they take action using mechanical means which can be slow otherwise they will need to carry tanks of water and chemicals which adds to size and weight; the cost of data capture is relatively high compared to other methods such as drones given their high unit current unit costs and slow pace; and so on.

IDTechEx comments that we are, however, only at the beginning of the beginning of here. Indeed, the rise of small mobile robots is not limited to just agricultural machinery. Take, for example, vehicles used in material handling. Here, small robots are being commercially developed to carry loads inside facilities. These mobile robots can autonomously navigate with no reliance on guiding infrastructure (e.g., magnetic tapes). These mobile robots will become increasingly able and authorised to share spaces with humans, intelligently navigating their way and avoiding objects. They will therefore enter new spaces to ferry items around, diffusing from highly controlled and structured environments towards increasingly less structured ones. This is considered more in the IDTechEx report ‘Agricultural Robots and Drones 2017-2027: Technologies, Markets, Players’.

www.IDTechEx.com/agri